The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (9 page)

In French they rather boringly just took the Latin
papilio
and called their butterflies
papillons
. But then, in a fit of inventiveness, they realised that the grand tents in which kings sat at tournaments and jousts were shaped like the wings of a butterfly, so they called them
papillons
, and we call them
pavilions
, which means that there’s a butterfly at one end of Lord’s Cricket Ground.

Why all these intricate and exquisite names? Nobody bothers with the humble fly (which does exactly what it says on the tin) or the beetle (
biter
) or the bee (
quiverer
), or the lousily-named louse. Butterflies hog all the attention of the word-makers.

Perhaps this is because in many quite distinct and unconnected cultures the butterfly is imagined to be a human soul that has shaken off this mortal coil of woes and now flutters happily through a gaily-coloured afterlife.

This was the belief of the Maoris, and of the Aztecs in whose mythology Itzpapalotl was the goddess of the Obsidian Butterfly: a soul encased in stone who could be freed only by another tongue-twisting god called Tezcatlipoca.

There also seems to have been a ghost of this belief among the ancient Greeks. The Greek for butterfly was
psyche
, and Psyche was the goddess of the soul. There’s a lovely allegorical poem about her called ‘Cupid and Psyche’, and she’s also the origin of the
study of the soul
:
psychoanalysis
.

Psychoanalysis and the Release of the Butterfly

The great thing about creating something is that you get to give it a name. Who would endure the expense and incontinence of babies, were it not for the fun of saddling another human with a moniker that you chose yourself?

With this in mind one can imagine Sigmund Freud sitting in his study in Vienna and considering Psyche, the Greek goddess of the soul and mystical butterfly. That’s what he was analysing (with the stress on the first two syllables), so he decided to call his new invention psychoanalysis.
Analysis
is Greek for
release
. So Freud’s new art would be, literally, the
liberation of the butterfly
. How pretty! Freud was probably so pleased with himself that he became lazy, for most of the other psychological terms are Jungian.

Carl Jung was Freud’s protégé. Then one day Carl had a dream that wasn’t about sex. He hesitated before telling Freud something quite that embarrassing. Confessing to a psychoanalyst that you’ve had an innocent dream is rather like confessing to your grandmother that you’ve had a dirty one. Freud was outraged. What sort of fruitcake, he demanded, has a dream that isn’t dirty? It was inconceivable. Freud decided that Jung had gone quite mad, that the dream really had been dirty, and that Jung was just being coy.

Jung insisted that his dream wasn’t about sex and that, in fact, it was about his grandparents being hidden in a cellar. So he rejected Freud’s pansexualism (not a sin of cookery, but the belief that everything comes down to nooky) and ran off to become a Jungian.

Having invented his own form of psychoanalysis, Jung now had naming rights. So it was Carl and not Sigmund who decided that a psychological problem should be called a
complex
. Then he thought up
introverts
and
extroverts
, and finally, realising that naming was a doddle, he invented
synchronicity
and
ambivalent
. And with that he sat down to rest on his laurels and consider his subterranean grandparents.

But the grand panjandrum and greatest inventor of psychological terms was neither Sigmund Freud nor Carl Jung. It was a man who was just as important but is far less known today: Richard von Krafft-Ebing.

Krafft-Ebing was born sixteen years before Dr Freud and 35 years before Jung. He was, essentially, the first doctor to start writing case histories of people whose sexual behaviour wasn’t entirely respectable.

The book that resulted,
Psychopathia Sexualis
(1886), was so scandalous that large chunks of it had to be written in Latin, in order to keep it out of the hands of the prurient public. The idea was that if you were clever enough to understand Latin, you couldn’t possibly be a pervert (something that nobody mentioned to Caligula).

Because Krafft-Ebing was a pioneer he had to invent terms left, right and centre. Humanity had a long history of condemning peccadilloes, but not of classifying them. So it was in the translation of
Psychopathia Sexualis
that English first got the words
homosexual
,
heterosexual
,
necrophilia
,
frotteur
,
anilingus
,
exhibitionism
,
sadism
and
masochism
.

Sadism
had in fact been around for a while in French. The French writer Donatien Alphonse François Marquis de Sade was famous for producing horrid books about people being horrid to each other in bed. Really horrid. Catchy titles like
One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom
should give you some idea, but a clearer image of the nature of Sade’s work comes from the fact that in the 1930s a historian by the name of Geoffrey Gorer, who was researching the marquis, went to the British Museum to read some of de Sade’s works that were stored there. However, he was told by the British Museum that it was a rule that people were only allowed to read de Sade’s books ‘in the presence of the Archbishop of Canterbury and two other trustees’.

So it’s easy to see how de Sade’s notoriety meant that his favourite activity became known as
sadism
in French. But Richard von Krafft-Ebing also needed a name for sadism’s opposite: masochism.

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who gave us the word
masochism
, is known to few, or less. This seems rather appropriate. While the Marquis de Sade strides around spanking Fame’s bottom with a hardbacked copy of
The Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom
, little Leo is forgotten in some ratty cellar, wearing a gimp-suit and whimpering over a copy of
Venus in Furs
.

Venus in Furs
(1870) was Masoch’s great work. It describes a chap called Severin who signs a contract with a lady (I use the term loosely) who is thereby:

… entitled not only to punish her slave as she deems best, even for the slightest inadvertence or fault, but also is herewith given the right to torture him as the mood may seize her or merely for the sake of whiling away the time …

As you can imagine,
Venus in Furs
would make a splendid book-group read, or christening present. Yet even Masoch’s masterwork is better known these days as a song by the Velvet Underground, whose lyrics have a fragile connection to the original novel, mainly in the use of the name Severin.

Venus in Furs
was rather closely based upon Leo’s own life. Masoch met a girl with the ridiculous name of Fanny Pistor. They signed just such a contract as the one above and set off to Florence together, with him pretending to be her servant. Exactly how much time Fanny Pistor whiled away and how is not recorded, and it’s probably best not to try to imagine.

When, in 1883, Krafft-Ebing was casting around for a name for a newly classified perversion, he thought of Sacher-Masoch’s novel. He wrote in
Psychopathia Sexualis
that:

I feel justified in calling this sexual anomaly ‘Masochism,’ because the author Sacher-Masoch frequently made this perversion, which up to his time was quite unknown to the scientific world as such, the substratum of his writings … he was a gifted writer, and as such would have achieved real greatness had he been actuated by normally sexual feelings.

Poor Leo was still alive when Krafft-Ebing appropriated his name for a psychological disorder. He was, apparently, peeved by the terminology. Mind you, he probably rather enjoyed the humiliation.

The Villains of the Language

History is written by victors. The Elizabethan poet Sir John Harington once wrote:

Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?

Why, if it prosper, none dare call it Treason.

But history is a lot fairer than language. Language takes your name and applies it to whatever it likes. Sometimes, however, it
is
fair, as with the word
quisling
.

Vidkun Quisling was a Norwegian maths prodigy and invented his own religion. He also embarrassed himself rather during the Second World War by trying to get Norway to surrender to the Nazis so that he could be the puppet Minister-President. He succeeded in his plan and ten weeks after his appointment
The Times
wrote:

Major Quisling has added a new word to the English language. To writers, the word Quisling is a gift from the gods. If they had been ordered to invent a new word for traitor … they could hardly have hit upon a more brilliant combination of letters. Aurally it contrives to suggest something at once slippery and tortuous. Visually it has the supreme merit of beginning with a Q, which (with one august exception) has long seemed to the British mind to be a crooked, uncertain and slightly disreputable letter, suggestive of the questionable, the querulous, the quavering of quaking quagmires and quivering quicksands, of quibbles and quarrels, of queasiness, quackery, qualms and quilp.

And it serves him right. However, language isn’t always on the side of justice. Consider these three names: Guillotine, Derrick and Jack Robinson. Which of those do you think was the nasty one?

Two Executioners and a Doctor

Once upon a time, hanging was the punishment for almost any crime. Even the great Elizabethan poet Ben Jonson, for the trivial offence of murder, was sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted when Jonson proved that he could read and thus got Benefit of the Clergy. Instead of being executed, he had a T branded on his thumb and was sent home with a warning.

The T stood for Tyburn, which is where the hangings used to take place. We even know the name of the man who would have hanged Ben Jonson: he was called Thomas Derrick.

Thomas Derrick was a nasty man. There hadn’t been enough applicants for the role of executioner and so the Earl of Essex pardoned a rapist on condition that he would take on the job. That rapist was Derrick.

Derrick was a bad man and a good executioner. The two are probably connected. In fact, Derrick was something of an innovator. Rather than just slinging the rope over the beam, he invented a complicated system of ropes and pulleys, and it was by this method that he, in 1601, executed the Earl of Essex.

There’s a moral in that, but I haven’t the foggiest notion what it is – and the ethics get more complicated when you consider that Derrick’s name survives and Essex’s doesn’t. The rope system he invented started to be used for loading and unloading goods down at the docks and that’s why modern cranes still have a
derrick
. It’s named after a rapist and executioner. There’s no justice in this world: look at Jack Robinson.

There are three main theories on why things happen
before you can say Jack Robinson
. The first is that Robinson used to be the French term for an umbrella (because of
Robinson Crusoe
, in which the hero has an umbrella and very little else), and that French servants were usually called
Jacques
. This meant that when rich Frenchmen visited England and were surprised by the inevitable shower of rain, they would shout, ‘Jacques, robinson!’ There is, though, no evidence for this theory at all.

The second theory is that there was an eccentric fellow in early nineteenth-century London who would walk out of parties without warning, often before you could even say his name, which was Jack Robinson. However, there’s no contemporary evidence for this strange Jack Robinson’s existence, so the second theory looks as dicey as the first.

The third and most plausible theory is that the phrase comes from Sir John Robinson, who definitely existed and was constable of the Tower of London from 1660 to 1679. He was therefore in charge of executions and was a stickler for efficiency rather than solemnity. The prisoner was marched out, put on the block and shortened without any opportunity for famous last words or blubbering. He didn’t even have the time to appeal to the overseer of the execution. He was beheaded
before he could say Jack Robinson
.